


the capacity to be alone

by live_die_be



Series: the capacity to be alone [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 14:11:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/837770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/live_die_be/pseuds/live_die_be
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock, John, and the transition from being a person with no people to being a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the capacity to be alone

People, as a general rule, dislike Sherlock. He's abrasive and blunt, and asks all the right questions at all the wrong times. Sherlock knows this, he's a high functioning sociopath, he wouldn't be that without  _knowing_  people; what they like, what they dislike, what drives them. He knows what bits of his personality are the most distasteful, knows what he'd have to do to change them, to blend in with the peons.

Sherlock  _knows_ , he's done it; blended in by acting normal, during the Dark Years just after Mycroft left to take a job with the government, and when Sherlock was still worried that maybe Mycroft had left because of him, because he wasn't normal. (When Sherlock had still thought that maybe if he was normal enough that Mycroft would come back.)

But normality was  _boring_ , people mundane and empty-headed and dull. It made  _Sherlock_  feel mundane and empty-headed and dull, and he learned fast that he wasn't  _built_  to be normal. He'd say the wrong thing or do something strange, and people would look at him in a way that reminded him of how Mycroft would when he was littler. A little sad, if it was a minor infraction that he should know not to do, or appalled, if it was something more extreme.

And then he learned that cocaine made him faster and smarter and brighter than ever, it explained away even the worst of his bad habits through drug-addict-eccentricity.

(Sherlock learned. Sherlock learned. Sherlock learned.)

(Mycroft never came back.)

* * *

John is the war, and if he is not the war, then he is nothing.

It was wonderful, wonderful work, patching up wounded soldiers in the field, knowing that  _he_   _was saving lives_. He loved it, loved the adrenaline and the echo of gunfire ringing in his ears; he loved all of it.

(Queen and country, Sherlock says once, derisively. The thing is, that was never the reason, never the point. He just wanted to  _save_  people, be a hero. Sherlock wouldn't ever understand that, though, so John doesn't try to explain.)

Then John is no longer the war, and he is nothing. "Nothing ever happens to me," he tells his therapist, and it's really not nearly as much of a hyperbole as he would like it to be. Nothing ever happens to him.

He meets Mike Stanford in the park, and trips over a precipice. Then there is Sherlock, a whirlwind of chaotic energy, tearing through John's life. He is his own sort of war, one that John is not entirely sure that he wants to fight. (He doesn't fight.)

It would be impossibly easy to fall into Sherlock's world and never find his way back out. He sometimes suspects that's what happened to Molly, to Lestrade. (But the thing is, the thing is, John doesn't want to find his way back out.)

* * *

Sherlock meets John and his world changes. He's  _used_  to being alone, he's always been alone, ever since Mycroft decided that government was more appealing than Sherlock. People don't like him and he's not  _normal_ , and that's why they  _don't_  like him.

But he's long-since given up on caring what people think, because they are mundane and empty-headed and dull, and for the most part beneath his attention.

Sherlock has never been a misunderstood genius, he knows what he's doing when he pushes buttons, and it's  _fun_ baiting people for reactions. He says what he knows will have an effect, and people are always so  _predictable_ , so boring.

John is not predictable. John says, "Amazing," when Sherlock shows off and deduces John's entire existence in a few sentences. He doesn't say, "Fuck off," or punch Sherlock in the face, or start crying when he says things that are truths.

John is not normal, and John has a limp that is all in his head. John is a doctor, and served in Afganistan, and he doesn't run in the other direction even when he sees Sherlock at his worst/best at a crime scene, as calculating and impersonal as anything.

He chases after Sherlock, and he surprises himself by letting himself be caught.

Suddenly Sherlock is not alone. It's a strange feeling, to have another person. One that he hasn't felt since Mycroft left and didn't come back and became Sherlock's arch-enemy.

John is  _there_ , someone Sherlock can rely on. It's something that he takes for granted, but he doesn't know any other way to be. He hasn't cared what people thought of him in a long time, because people don't know  _anything_ , but he cares about what John thinks, because if he does something bad enough then maybe John will leave too, like Mycroft did.

But John doesn't care that Sherlock isn't normal, or that he doesn't pretend to be normal, and John doesn't  _want_  Sherlock to change.

(John isn't Mycroft, and he isn't going to leave, but Sherlock still worries that one day he  _will_.)

(John isn't Mycroft, and he isn't going to leave, but sometimes he worries that one day  _Sherlock_  will.)


End file.
